


let no children approach it

by lalaietha



Series: Renegotiations of Fate [3]
Category: Valdemar Series - Mercedes Lackey
Genre: M/M, canon!Moondance is terrible at his job, fixing a canon that doesn't make sense, no seriously he's terrible at his job, rewrite of a canonical period
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-06
Updated: 2019-11-06
Packaged: 2021-01-23 22:41:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21327856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/lalaietha
Summary: A brief snippet between Moondance and Starwind while Lendel and Van are both in the Vale, and also still a burning disaster area of a trash-fire; sometime between parts 3 and 5 of the previous fic.
Relationships: Moondance k'Treva/Starwind k'Treva
Series: Renegotiations of Fate [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/15084
Comments: 3
Kudos: 63





	let no children approach it

**Author's Note:**

> In order to deal with _The Last Herald Mage_ in a psychologically realistic fashion, one hits a hard problem with Moondance. As written, he's actually a _horrible_ mental health practitioner (no really: _horrible_, worse than Savil) and so you're stuck with a choice between maintaining his canonical presentation and actions and dealing with the fact that he does literally the wrong thing in almost every respect, or you rewrite him as having the ability to tell his own ass from an atlas when it comes to dealing with trauma and mental illness, at which point nothing he does or says is the same as canon. 
> 
> I find the latter the less frustrating option which means among other things, Moondance is not going to do things like expect a catastrophically depressed and suicidal teenager with a life-history of emotional abuse and neglect who has just survived a devastating trauma to be Kind and Thoughtful about his reactions to people making emotionally difficult requests of him, because that's Fucking Stupid, and is instead going to be behaving the way someone with a single solitary brain-cell's worth of experience with this stuff would. 
> 
> On the other hand that doesn't mean he isn't tripping over the difficulty that Savil has no idea about people at all, and the _rest_ of the Tayledras don't have any context for how emotional neglect and abuse fuck kids up because that kind of thing is very rare for them, and while he does have two clues to rub together, this still isn't Moondance's _normal_ job. So things are Difficult.

"The longer you expect him to behave like a Tayledras-born," Moondance's voice comes from the corner of the room, in the moonlight, cadence formal and just short of lilting, "the longer you will find yourself trying to field half-trained levin-bolts without hurting him."

Starwind stops himself before his response is out of his mouth, irritable and affronted, although he cannot hide the wave that echoes between their minds - that being one of the hazards of a life-bond, especially when not already prepared to dampen emotions. Moondance ignores that, and Starwind sets himself back - that was the Healer-Adept speaking, and not his beloved.

Moondance is sitting by the window, dressed in the silver and grey that disappears into the shadow cast by the moonlight. He has been immersed in the Heartstone and the land, and recently: the otherworldly sense is all through him, every inch of his presence, and Starwind further checks the pride that comes from being the elder mage, and gives the ground to the greater. It is in truth not that hard, although it is also not second nature. He has never pretended not to be proud.

"I had tried to explain that, obliquely," Moondance goes on, and then he sighs. "I hoped not to need to hit the target in the centre. But that is, perhaps, the mistake that everyone makes with this boy, and Wingsister Savil's report of what he said to father ought to have been the warning."

"I do not recall," Starwind admits, and comes to sit at the other end of the window-seat to listen.

"'You've lied to me all my life and I couldn't prove it,'" Moondance quotes, meticulously, eyes still distant and gaze inward, "'but I know when people lie to me now.'" Moondance makes an eloquent gesture with one hand. "And what is indirection, except, if not a kind of lie, a careful clouding of the truth? The truth is very important to him, and yet people have always wound him around with various kinds of falsehood, both in person and in conception and that is probably something that is going to go wrong no matter how good our intentions. These things resonate." 

He exhales slowly. "So, truth, ashke: the boy is broken. It is possible he will never be mended - ai." He sighs. "If I could send each boy to different corners of the Earth, in the care of two Healing-Adepts, two of the right kind, I might have faith in their healing. Here even the Gods have erred, ashke."

At Starwind's indrawn breath, Moondance's face is graced by a wry smile. "Erred, or offered up a future sacrifice," he corrects himself. "Either way, ashke, the lasha'Kaladra belonged to the Gods themselves, and yet, here we are. With both boys, and both of them pushed beyond anything just."

Starwind tilts his head, considering, and begins, "What he did, ashke - " meaning Savil's first student. Moondance, though, snorts, cutting him off.

"I'd like to see what _you_ would do," he says, his speech suddenly more in the patterns of the boy who came to them, rather than the Healing-Adept he now was, but also sharp and probing, almost like a needle investigating a wound, "if _I_ were killed while far away, by an enemy no one else would believe was trying to strike, after being taught for _years_ that the least mention of said enemy and said enemy's crimes will only bring you lectures on how you must find a way to be neutral and smile at him and his allies at mealtimes, for everyone else's good." 

Starwind closes his mouth on anything else. Moondance's look is level, and a little sardonic. "Hah - ashke," he goes on, and if the cadence is still informal the Healer-Adept and maybe more than that is in his eyes and Starwind finds himself looking down, acknowledging the point even as Moondance finishes it, "I would like to see what you would do if that were true now. Let alone when you were a child, and let alone had you ever been a child as these two have been. Which you have never been."

The first point, Starwind takes. But at the last sentence he gives his lifemate a look of silent query, and Moondance sighs, the edge leaving him for a moment, replaced by regret. 

"They are not Tayledras, ashke, my heart," Moondance says, looking out at the light that gives him his name once again. "Even the sternest among you cherishes the children you have, and even the sternest is checked by companion and by custom and by all the others who look and see and would intervene, to check domination or abuse, and in the worst case take the child away, and give them parents elsewhere that will love them as they should.

"You must remember," he says, "that outside of our people, that is not so. That families - particularly fathers," he corrected himself, and there is a touch of bitterness there that has not been for many years now, "can rule over families like petty gods, and many do. And indeed that every grown man or woman in the lives of _these_ two, for ever so many years, despised them, feared them, were disgusted by them, lied to them, controlled them and in every case were the _enemy_ and the predator they shared their meals with - or at best, indifferent statues that moved through their lives. Fourteen, ashke," he finishes, "fourteen for Tylendel and sixteen for Vanyel - these are late years to finally come to the custody of the _first_ grown woman who did not fit that shape in their lives - and," his eyebrow lifts, "though I love our Wingsister as much as you do, and as much as anyone might love a sister, she is not her most clever with people, ashke."

After a reluctant moment, Starwind replies, quietly, "This does not change the danger they may be - " and Moondance waves one hand.

"Of course not," he replies, a touch short. "Whether a dog growls and snaps because he thinks he rules the house, or because he has been kicked so many times he can't do otherwise for fear - that does not change the pain of the bite, or the threat to those who have done no wrong. But the remedy? That is very different, my love. If an animal is driven mad through fear and domination, more fear and greater control will not make it safe again. Much the same is true of people." He considers for a moment, and then the Healing-Adept adds, "And Heartstones, if it comes to that, but they become more like people the longer we use them."

Starwind spreads his arms. "I am rebuked," he says, and Moondance comes back to himself, and shakes his head.

"Tchah," he says. "The rebuke is as much for myself, and for the world." And after a moment he moves, shifting gracelessly (and he must be tired, for it to be so) and arranging himself to lean against Starwind's chest; Starwind rests his hands on his beloved's shoulders.

"And now, then?" Starwind asks, and provokes a final sigh.

"We wait," he says. "We hope that this lasha'Kaladra is older and wiser and better guided than the first - "

(And for a moment, Starwind thinks he can hear a second snort, this one equine, but he does not follow up the thought, choosing instead not to notice.)

" - and we wait for the wounded creatures we have inadvertently frightened to creep back into the room, so that we can try this again."

Starwind takes a long moment to consider whether what he wonders next needs be said, but in the end, decides to speak: "Ashke."

"Mn?"

He strokes a hand over Moondance's hair before he says, "Much of what you have said applies to you, as much as to the lost ones."

"Ah," Moondance replies, and the laughter runs between his mind and Starwind's own, and his voice carries the smile, and the echoed thought, :I wondered if you were going to notice that,: "but I was lucky. Well. A twisted luck. I left the past burned behind me, ashke, and I came here, and I found you - impatient, perhaps, sometimes stiff-necked - "

He is saying it to provoke, and Starwind obliges him by tugging, once, but soft and brief, on one of Moondance's braids.

" - but whole," Moondance says, pretending to ignore that. "And wise. Sometimes. But most of all, ashke, whole and at home and at peace. I came from fire to healing, my heart. I could leave what I was behind and shed like snakeskin - there was much to do to build Moondance from the wreckage, but I was let to do it, in shelter and in peace. These two - " and the smile and laughter fades, "- they are two shattered children still, and bound together so that they cannot help but cut each other over and over again in the best of circumstances - and these are not those. And they cannot leave their shed skin: there is no new place for them, not really. Not here. We may not say it to them, ashke, but they know it as well as we do. You might try praying, Starwind," he says, with the surfacing of his more mordant humour. "It might help."

"What?" Starwind retorted. "You are not already?"

"Hah." Moondance prodded Starwind's arm where it wrapped around him. "The relations of healers to gods is its own thing. 'Prayer' would be a misleading word."


End file.
